Did you know that blogging is the new “BLACK”?

A blog can be uploaded to networking sites to spread the word about your business – that’s free advertising!
A blog gives you the chance to voice your opinions to the world.
A good blog can generate subscribers and we all know how important they are!
A blog with the right keywords will help the search engines to find you.
An informative blog can give you kudos…you could be seen as an expert in your field.
A blog can create an income from affiliate advertising and adsense.

So what are the 8 things you should have on your official blog site.

1. A subscriber’s sign up box. This will enable visitors to subscribe to the RSS feed of your posts.
2. A newsletter subscription box. Once they have agreed to receive your mailings then you can safely market to them by e-mail – it is always better to add a few subtle links to your products or services in a newsletter than to bamboozle them with adverts.
3. A comment box. When people comment on your blogs you are capturing their details.
4. The Opportunity to buy something. Of-course it is great when your visitors spend money on your website but you will need a lot of visitors to make any real profits from it but it is possible. The magic word is traffic!
5. Adsense – I have a lot of visitors and do make a few bob from Adsense but again you need a lot of traffic to make any real money.
6. Adverts – a busy website is more likely to attract advertisers so concentrate on getting your visitors up before you approach any advertisers.
7. Bookmarking buttons to places like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Everytime you write a new post hit those networking buttons and send your work around the web. I am a member of 50 groups with LinkedIn alone, my posts go out to all of them on a daily basis. Don’t upload the full article, just a snippet then a link to your website.
8. This brings us to the most important part of your blog or article…THE TITLE!
If you want literary accolades then write something clever like “To blog or not to blog that is…..”
The trouble is that this title will not help the needy searcher…if your target audience is someone who wants to know more about blogging then make your title as search engine friendly as you can.
Think of the words people will use when searching Google then create your title to not only inform people of the content of your post but also include the important keywords.

Pat Sutton
Official Blog – Internet Marketing and Personal Development
http://www.patsutton.com

So why should you have an official blog?

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have and how benevolent you are, you can give things away for free, you can raise money for great causes, you can hold people’s hands but everyone at sometime needs to make a living.
The baker puts bread on your table, not to feed your family but to feed his own!

I am sure, if you own a bakery or a grocers then online marketing is not so important but if you have a product or service that has a website at it’s heart then you need to know how to drive traffic, create a contact list and to make sales.

Ok, so you have a great website that showcases your products or services or you have signed up for an online, work at home business that has provided you with their propriatory website to promote – what next?

It doesn’t matter what kind of online or offline business you have, if you sell from a website then you need to get it out there to the right target audience.

Not many of us are really clever enough to know, for sure, who will buy from us, I promise you, I have had many surprises! But somehow we need to work out how to get our business in front of buying customers. So a scatter gun approach is not really the way to do it, you need to target the right people.

So how do you recruit people to an online business. How do you get people to come to your website?
Online? Offline? Cold calling? Friends and family?

Let’s look at Friends and Family first.
If you want to lose friends then pitch to them, the same with family members. I don’t know about you but I would hate it if my loved ones avoided me because they felt guilty for not buying into my business! So that is a definite “no no”.

Cold calling? Hey! I’m into this online gig because I want to enjoy it, I want a better quality of life and cold calling just does not do it for me! So, for me, that’s out too.

Offline – now here’s a thing – yes it can work, even for an online business. You could:

1. Get out there to your local business networking events.

2. Build relationships with local business owners to encourage referrals.

3. Take stands at exhibitions.

4. Advertise in the newspapers.

5. Give out flyer’s in shopping malls and markets.

6. Carry business cards for those chance encounters!

Then there’s ONLINE.
Now this is where your marketing can really rock!

Here are my 5 very best online marketing tips.

1. Any good at writing?
You don’t have to be Jeffrey Archer but a good clear blog with all the right keywords can be a fantastic marketing tool.
The article should not be about your business but about something helpful for the reader. Of-course it should be linked to your business, for instance if you are a garden landscaper then an article or blog about growing roses would be good but a blog about baking a chocolate cake may not be.
You need to engage with the reader, they need to see you as a leader and expert.
Once you have constructed your blog or article you then need to add a clear succinct signature at the bottom, this is very important for obvious reasons.

I know what you’re asking….what do I do with my blog once it is finished?

Well if you have a blog section on your website then that is ideal as readers can click to your website to read the blog.

You would open your blog on your website, copy the URL or address and add that link along with a catchy intro like:
An easy way to bake a chocolate cake – if you love chocolate you’ll love this – http://www……
You would add it to places like Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy, LinkedIn etc that’s assuming that you are a member of all these social sites, if not why not???

If you have written your blog on someone else’s website, like Blogger, Ezines or another blogging platform like my site for business women, TheBusinessWoman then you need to make sure that all your website details are in your signature.

2. Twitter!
I know a lot of people think that Twitter is a waste of time well, I promise you that it is not, if you do it right.
A daily tweet containing great advice to followers who are your target audience can really boost your profile. If you have a good profile then people will see you in a good light and are more likely to buy from you. If you read my blog, How to market on Twitter, you will see how you can make Twitter really work for your business.

3. Facebook Fan Pages.
Create a fan page with the same name as your business then set to work making friends and then inviting them to become fans of your page. Once you have a reasonable amount of members you can create a badge to upload onto your website. This creates a sense of community and will give confidence to your website visitors. Of-course you also have your fans to market to as well.

4. Relationships.
Join groups and forums to get to know people, (not to pitch to them), once they get to know you they will eventually ask you what you do and then you can get away with a subtle pitch.

5. LinkedIn groups.
Join the groups on LinkedIn, you are allowed upto 50 group memberships. Of-course you need to find groups of people who would be interested in your sector and will be beneficial to you as well. Then once in a group you can upload your articles or blogs to their discussion pages. These are then sent out by the system to the group members in update e-mails. Some of the groups have memberships of thousands of people each so your one article alone can get you enormous exposure.

Pat Sutton – Internet Marketing Specialist – Official Blog Site http://www.PatSutton.com
Business Mentor with LifePath Unlimited – http://www.ThisBusinessRocks.com

How to market your website so that people buy from you!

A Retweet allows Twitter users to share their favourite tweets with their own followers.
So if someone has 10,000 followers and they like one of your tweets and they retweet it, then it will go out to all of their followers, good eh!

It is done by copying and pasting the original tweet and sending it out. It’s usual to put “RT” plus the originator’s username at the beginning of the tweet. Here’s an example:

RT@thebizwoman: How to monetize your blog!

Obviously, if you regularly tweet great content then people will pick up on it and retweet you. They will also retweet you if your tweets are relevant to them or even, dare I say it, complementary.

A good way to get people to retweet you is to ask to be retweeted.
This works really well if your tweets are for a good cause or are likely to be helpful to your follower’s audience.

Here’s an example:

Entrepreneurs – learn how to monetize your blog PLEASE RETWEET ME!

This is only about 66 character; very important if you don’t want retweets with clipped off ends as you are only allowed a total of 140 characters in your tweets.

It is always better to simplify the procedure for your retweeter.
There is a great little application called PleaseRT.me – http://pleasert.me/
You add your tweet and it makes you keep it short then it adds a plea for a retweet at the end of your message, (I’m saying “message” because I’m fed up of saying “tweet”), which your follower can then click on to easily retweet without all the copy and pasting.
You can try it out now by retweeting this post.

Let’s face it if you don’t ask you don’t get!

Pat Sutton – Official Blog, http://www.patsutton.com

Retweet – What does it mean and how important is it!

In my previous blog “6 steps closer to monetising your blog” I said that you need:
1. Patience
2. Resilience.
3. A great imagination.
4. Knowledge.
5. The discipline to learn.
6. Multiple Income streams?

Today I am going to tell you about the next 6 items you need:

1. Products that sell well.
2. A great mailing list.
3. An easy to use e-mail marketing system.
4. To be seen on the first page of Google.
5. A membership site with real value.
6. Private advertisers.

It is very difficult to find a product that sells - the Internet has spawned an enormous amount of “get rich quick” schemes. Some are great but some are…quite honestly, a mis-representation.
My rule of thumb is…if it sounds too good to be true then it is too good to be true!

I am sure that some people actually do make a lot of money from these businesses but they usually have a large infrastructure behind them.

When they say stuff like, “make money while you sleep” it does ring alarm bells for me!
In saying that, a busy blog site with the right money making products can actually make money for you while you sleep but you need to work very hard when you’re awake to get it!

I have made a pact with myself, I will only sell products that I firmly believe in, like my Bloggers Workbook. This course actually helped me to change my hobby blog into a great
business.
So my advice to you is to only sell the stuff that you would use yourself, that way you have more conviction in your sales pitch.

The mailing list is your life’s blood. Always have a sign up box on your website. If you can give something away as a sweetener then that is even better. Make sure that it is something worth having.
I would like to E-SHOUT an important point at you….do not abuse your mailing list. If they have signed up to receive a newsletter then that is what you should send them. Your marketing can be inside your newsletter.
If thay have signed up to a general mailing list then you have a little more freedom but the content of anything you send to them should be, value, value, value, a subtle sales pitch, then more value.

There are many marketing systems out there, the one I use is Aweber, I find them the easiest to use and one of the cheapest. There are many more like IContact, Constant Contact, Getresponse.
The marketing sytem works by allowing you to set up e-mail campaigns. So when your visitor registers to be added to your mailing list it automatically generates an e-mail from your
marketing system to ask them to confirm their subscription, (they call, this opting in). Once they have confirmed then the massages that you will have previously set up will arrive into
their inbox either daily, weekly monthly or what ever days you have chosen.
It’s as simple as that!
The beauty of this system is that any new subscriber, no matter when they join, will receive the first message and then the second and so on.
You can actually configure your sign up box within the system too!

We would all love to be seen on the first pages of the search engines and if you are selling something unique then you will probably be there after a couple of days. But there are many
thousands of blogging sites out there, all trying to get to the top spots so the competition is fearce for us.
My answer for you is to do what you do best…blogs, blogs, blogs and more blogs.
When you write your blog on your website you need to also upload it to the best networking sites as well, sites like EZines, Ecademy, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
There is an easy way to do this. Make sure that you have social bookmarking share buttons at the bottom of your blog. Once in situe on your website it can be sent out across the web in no time at all.
Here is a screanshot of Google today, notice how my last blog, “6 steps closer to monetising your blog”, has actually got three….not just one spot, on the front page of Google and that’s not paying a penny in advertising. If you’re having trouble seeing this then try searching, “How to monetise your blog”.
Clever eh!

A membership site
You can provide products, a course or service…these are good if you want members to pay on a monthly basis thus generating a residual income for you. See ours here!
You have a choice how you sell it.
You can have a free membership that will help you to generate a mailing list of a captive audience.
Or you can have a “Join now for $1 or first month FREE offer”.

What ever the offering there is one thing that is paramount….give them a risk free call to action!

Think of all the things that would be going through your head at that moment before you joined.

Will this instigate spam?
Is there a catch?
If I don’t like it, can I have my money back?
Can I hear from someone who has used this?
Do I trust this person?
Will my hair fall out?
Will my………

At this point you need to think of everything they are likely to say to themselves and address that problem…such as money back guarantees, full contact details of the vendor, testimonials
of satisfied customers, no spam etc.etc.
If you get it right, a membership can build and build to make you some serious money that you can actually earn while you sleep.

Private Advertisers are those elusive companies who may be prepared to pay you a nice tidy sum to have their banners all over your blog.
Be-careful, what you gain in money you could lose in loyal readers.
Although it always amazes me how people think that us bloggers are doing this out of the goodness of our hearts, we stay up all hours researching and writing all for no financial remuneration…get real guys… as they say, “The baker puts bread on your table, not to feed your family but to feed his own“.

Pat Sutton – Official Blog http://www.PatSutton.com

How to really monetise your blog

I’m often asked how to make money from Blogging.
Not wanting to dampen enthusiasm, it’s not a get rich quick scheme.
But it’s not impossible.
To get you there you need to have these six crucial skills:

1. Patience
2. Resilience.
3. A great imagination.
4. Knowledge.
5. The discipline to learn.
6. Multiple Income streams?

Why patience you say?
If you do everything right.
Join blogging forums, create networks of friends and acquaintances, got seen on social media websites and actively collaborate on other blog websites.

Then it can still take months, even years before your have any kind of recognition.

With a legible writing style and perseverance you will make it in the end!

Resilience?
By resilience, I mean being able to take it on the chin!
Being able to fail without labelling yourself a failure.
Being successful at something doesn’t make you a success.  When that publisher or editor rejects you, pick yourself up and start all over again with even more resiliance!

A Great Imagination is imperative!
You need to be able to see outside the box.
Knowledge and information is widely available on the web but you need to have the imagination to create a useful blog from that information. When you compose your next blog you need to know who your target audience is going to be, then you need to work out ways of getting in front of them.
Your title, (absolutely essential if you want your blog to be read), needs to grab them and say, “READ ME!”.

Knowledge.
It is all too easy for someone to claim to be an expert.
There’s no Internet police checking your credentials but I believe “what goes around comes around” so don’t copy, don’t pinch other’s stuff and don’t claim to be what you are not!
A lot of people will read other blogs and articles and do a good job of copying them by not copying them. But it is easy to recognise the fakers. Take a look at their other work. If the writing style is different every time then they are probably seasoned fake artists.
Don’t get me wrong, we all do our research, that’s what the web is for, but there’s a lot of difference between learning and passing that knowledge on and copying someone elses articles and changing a few phrases.
If I see something that excites me, then I print the article and read it and then do my report on it. This is a great lesson as not having it sitting there on your computer you are not tempted to copy and paste – you have to use your own words.
One more point on KNOWLEDGE. As is normal with a business, you must be prepared to invest financially – you could do worse than taking up a few subscriptions for products and courses on good blogger’s websites, you will be amazed how much you’ll learn.

The Discipline to Learn.
If you want to keep up with the times you need to be ever evolving. The Internet and Social Media changes on a daily basis.
What was a great strategy yesterday could be a waste of time today.
When I first started to market my blogs on Twitter, I was in-undated with visits to my website even though my followers were under a thousand. Now I have many thousand followers yet the response has not gone up that much in relation. I am afraid that we are victims of our own actions.
We know that most people who ask us to pop over to their website for some great stuff are almost certainly going to have a hidden agenda and alteria motives. But that’s Ok if what you get from then is of value!
If you are like me and you are always inquisitive to see if there are any snippets of information that you can pass on to your readers then you may well profit from these opportunities but many of you are probably far too busy, so the offerings are ignored.
The lesson here is, don’t be too hasty, if there is one thing that has come out of all this, it is that people know that if they give something of value then people will be attracted to them or their business so it is rare that the info is worthless.

Mutliple income streams!
Google AdSense on your website? You’re not going to get rich but you can make enough to pay for the odd evening out. Good affiliates? They may bring in a little more than AdSense, but you have to have a mighty busy website to make any real money from affiliates.
The most efficient way of getting closer to monetising your blog is to create a subscriber list. As they say, “The Money Is In The List!”.
Create a subscribe box on your website where they can get something worthwhile for free then once you have your subscribers you can start to work on the relationship. When they see you as a leader and as an expert in your field then you can start to market to them. The format is: give them good stuff, give them more good stuff, give them more good stuff then, when you have their attention, do the pitch then follow that with more good stuff. Be careful, gently does it! You don’t want them to un-subscribe.

Watch this space for my next article, “How to make big money from Blogging”.

Pat Sutton – Official Blog http://www.PatSutton.com

6 steps closer to monetising your blog!